River Thieves (39 page)

It was night by this time and the only light in the shelter was cast by the fire. Noel Young pushed himself to his feet and announced he was about to go down to the river to fish and he invited the officer to come along.

Buchan looked at him.
“Vous alhez pêcker maintenant?”
he said.
“Dans le noir?”
He’d seen no sign of it to this point, but he thought the man must be drunk to the point of senselessness.

“
Venez avec moi,”
Young said, and he went out the door and headed down towards the river.

Buchan got to his feet. “Rowsell,” he whispered to the corporal. “Take a couple of men down to the shoreline in a few minutes. I’m not sure what this one has in mind. He says we’re going
fishing.”

“In the dark, sir?”

“Apparently, yes.”

He found Young kneeling beside the canoe. A long torch lay on the ground beside him, the head wrapped with tightly woven dried reeds. The Mi’kmaq struck sparks into a ball of tinder and blew gently on the fragile ripple of flame, then held the torch above it, turning the head slowly until it was well alight. He
stood and used a hand to invite Buchan into the canoe, then handed him the torch. He pushed the length of the canoe into the shallow water and stepped in himself, paddling out into the current and drifting slowly downstream.

“Où allons-nous?”
Buchan asked.

They rounded a point of land and Young turned the canoe into a broad steady where the water ran twice the depth of the river.
“Ici,”
he said. He set the paddle down and took up a spear, its wooden shaft about five feet in length. The tip was barbed iron. There was a length of cord tied at the bottom and Young fastened the loose end to his wrist. He moved to the middle of the canoe and pushed his knees as wide as the sides allowed for balance. Buchan turned to face him, still unsure what was happening, or what might be expected of him. In the light of the torch he could see only the man kneeling across from him, the gunnels of the canoe, a six-foot circumference of river water. The shoreline, the forest, even the stars overhead were lost to him.

“You think Noel Young crazy, hey?”

“Not at all.”

The Mi’kmaq smiled at him. “You think Noel Young drunk?”

“No,” he lied.

Young told him to hold the torch out over the water, about two feet above the surface. He lifted the spear to his shoulder and stared past the torchlight down into the river. Buchan watched his face, the hairless upper lip, the motion of muscles in the jaw as he clenched and unclenched his teeth. His ears were pierced and hung with pendants of birds and fish carved from bone or shells. “You were on the River Exploits last
March,” he said, “when the Peytons carried the Red Indian woman down from the lake.”

Young lifted a finger to his lips without taking his eyes from the water, then pointed. Buchan looked down to see one of the last salmon of the season rise to the light and turn from the surface, the pale length of its belly flashing in the glow of the torch before the spearhead drove through the water.

Noel Young lifted the spear from the water and the writhing fish came out of the river with it. He looked across at Buchan.

“Dick Richmond said that you spent a night with them.”

“After they got the woman, heading down to the coast.” Young released the salmon from the barbed head of the spear and it slapped its torn body helplessly against the bark of the canoe.

“They killed two Red Indian men. Did they tell you that?”

He motioned for Buchan to hold the torch back out over the water and lifted the spear to his shoulder again.

“Richmond shot one of the Reds, yes?”

Young nodded.

“And the old man, John Senior. He killed the other?”

The Mi’kmaq turned his face from the river to stare at Buchan. “Richmond say it was Irishman.” He looked back to the water. “His wife Micmac.”

“Reilly?”

“Reilly. Joe Jep. He put the rifle behind the ear.” Young used his free hand to point to a spot above and behind his own ear. “Bang.”

A second salmon rose staring into the light and torqued away too late. The canoe rocked and settled.

Buchan was stunned. “
Richmond vous a dit ceci?”

Young nodded. He said that later in the evening after the party had turned in, he and Richmond tended the fire and kept watch. Richmond talked, talked, talked, he was a big man, Young said, but it was his mouth that made him dangerous. He told Young about the trip to the lake and the struggle on the ice when Richmond subdued the Red Indian who was the size of a bear and so drunk on rage that there was no choice but to kill him. Reilly sat up from his blankets and told Richmond he’d best keep his counsel, which Richmond took exception to. “Now Mr. Reilly here,” Richmond said then, “never would have guessed he had it in him. Just walked up to the other poor bastard and shot him.” Young again used his free hand to indicate the placement of the muzzle. “Bang,” he said again.

“Reilly,” Buchan whispered.

They were hammer and tiss about it then, Young said, and he laughed and shook his head. The two men rolled about in the snow like women and roused the rest of the camp with their cursing. They had a time of it trying to separate them and it was fifteen minutes or more of pushing and shouting before anyone realized the woman had made off into the trees.

“Reilly,” Buchan said again.

There was a commotion upriver, the sound of oars in the water. Rowsell was calling across the water. “Captain Buchan! Is everything all right? Captain Buchan!”

The cutter rounded the point of land and Buchan stood slowly, holding the torch aloft. He swore under his breath. “I’m all right,” he shouted back. “Everything’s fine.” He looked down at the Mi’kmaq man who was shaking his head slightly and smiling into the river. Buchan said, “Everything’s
fine, Corporal. We’re fishing.”

Notes from Buchan’s interview with Richmond were the most recent entries in the journal. Peyton guessed the officer had made them in the cutter, as they rowed back to Reilly’s tilt or alone by the fire on the beach after all others had turned in for the night. Buchan had written
Micmac furrier on return trip
and underlined the first two words twice. Richmond was subtler and more cunning than anyone gave him credit for. “Bastard,” Peyton said aloud.

There were a number of pages then referring to the fruitless days of searching the coastline, observations on the weather, Mary’s delicate state of health, John Peyton’s solicitousness where the Indian woman’s comfort and well-being were concerned. There was a long entry written just after the conversation with Mary and Cassie in the parlour.

Previous to this, a scatter of notes from the interview itself,
Two men
underlined and outlined in a box, the word
Husband
underlined and then crossed out. There were two pages of the naive maps of the River Exploits and the lake, of the coastline around Burnt Island, sketched and detailed by Buchan and Mary on the very table at which he now sat. An entry written following Buchan’s first unsatisfactory attempt to examine Peyton’s testimony directly:
Refuses to answer any questions, defensive and dismissive. Definitely hiding something. Under the influence of J. Peyton Sr. in this, as in all other things.

Then pages of references to duties aboard the
Grasshopper
during the trip up the coast; meetings in St. John’s prior to departure; a summary of Peyton’s grand jury testimony; a list of the men who accompanied the Peytons on their March expedition.

He stopped there and hid his face in his hands. He rubbed his eyes fiercely and shook his head.

“John Peyton.”

He jumped back in his chair and quickly closed the journal, covering as much of it as he could with his arm. “Cassie,” he said.

She came into the kitchen behind him and sat in a chair across the table.

“How long were you standing there watching me,” he said as lightly as he could. Her face was as drawn and gaunt as the winter he carried her down from Reilly’s tilt on the river. “You scared me half to death,” he told her. Peyton reached out to push the candle back to the middle of the table. He crossed his
arms over the journal and stared at the light.

“Did you know about the trip your father took with Harry Miller and William Cull down the river? After Miller’s house was burnt down?” She didn’t look at him as she spoke, staring across at the fire, and Peyton slipped the book underneath his seat.

“Where did you hear talk of that?”

“John Senior told me, just now. Before you came home with Mary.”

“I heard some of it from Cull. Richmond and Taylor used to talk of it now and then. John Senior never said a word to me about it himself.” Cassie was shaking her head and he thought she was on the verge of tears. He said, “John Senior’s a hard, hard man, Cassie.”

She looked across at him. “I want to know what happened on the lake,” she said.

The two Beothuk men came down off the shoreline and walked across the ice to where the Peytons and their men stood waiting. They stopped at a distance of about ten yards from the white men, and the larger of the two, the man holding the branch of white spruce, began to speak. His voice was clear and even and he went on for a long time while his audience alternately stared at him and one another. He beat his chest with the fist of his free hand. He held both hands in front of him in appeal. The cold of the ice stole up through the feet of the white men and they shifted and stamped where they stood and still the Beothuk went on. He made his argument in careful detail and with all the rhetorical flourish he could
muster as if he believed simply the appearance of reason and civility would be enough to alter what his own experience told him was inevitable in the unfolding event. One of the Englishmen said, “Does anyone know what the hell he’s going on about.” But no one answered. When the Beothuk reached the end of his plea he surveyed the group before him, each man in turn. He stepped towards them with his right hand extended, first to John Peyton who stood beside his wife. They shook hands and he turned to those men standing nearby and took their hands as well.

The Beothuk man turned to the woman then and spoke several words to her, and he took her gently by the elbow to lead her away from the white men on the ice.

John Senior said, “You keep that savage off the girl, John Peyton.”

The younger Peyton began speaking to the Beothuk then while continuing to hold the woman’s other arm. He motioned and pointed with his free hand to indicate the Beothuk man would be welcome to accompany the party back to the coast as well, and as it became clear he would not be permitted to remove his wife to the shoreline, the Beothuk raised his voice in response and held more tightly to her elbow. The woman’s hands were tied behind her back, the loop of her arms mapping the shape of a heart as the two men pulled from opposite directions.

John Senior stepped up then and tried to loosen the Indian’s grip, shouting against the words of the Beothuk, and their senseless argument spiralled like loose snow in a gale until it seemed that both men were blinded by it. When his hand was pried loose from the woman’s arm the Beothuk turned on the
old man, grabbing him about the throat and wrestling him to the ground, screaming into his face all the while, wetting the white man’s face with spit.

Peyton backed away from the fight, still holding the woman. “Get him off,” he shouted. “Jesus, get him off.”

Richmond and Taylor both reached for the Indian and grabbed him uselessly by the hair and the thick cloak of caribou hide. Richmond took up his rifle then and began slamming the heavy wooden butt against the back of the Beothuk’s head, succeeding only in silencing the man who clenched his teeth and refused to relinquish his hold on the old man’s throat. John Senior could be heard then, an intermittent tortured grunting like a fading heartbeat, and there was the dull thunk of the rifle butt striking bone.

The woman was shouting and pulling towards her husband. Peyton turned her around and pressed her face against his shoulder. “Shoot him if you have to,” he shouted.

Richmond turned to stare, the rifle held aloft in his hands like a spear.

Reilly said, “John Peyton.”

“Shoot the bastard,” Peyton yelled again.

Richmond turned the rifle around in his hands and held the barrel flush to the man’s back, the report of the rifle shot muffled by the thick caribou-hide clothing. The woman screamed into the collar of Peyton’s coat. The Beothuk man slumped forward and choked on a spurt of blood in his throat, though he held fiercely to John Senior’s neck a few moments longer like an animal dragging its useless hind legs after its spine has been broken. Richmond and Taylor leaned in and finally pulled him free of the old man, pushing him onto his back on the ice where
he stared into the pale blue of the sky and worked his mouth around a word that would never escape his lips.

John Senior turned and pushed himself to his hands and knees, his face mottled scarlet and purple. His hat was off his head and sweaty strands of grey hair hung away from the pale scalp, as dank and listless as seaweed. Everyone else stood about in the very spots where they had been when the Beothuk man began speaking, as still as the trees on the shore.

John Senior coughed and pounded the ice with his fist as the cold air galled his throat. When he looked up from where he knelt he saw the second Beothuk man, still frozen in place like the white men around him. They stared at one another a moment, and without coming to his feet John Senior scravelled towards his rifle. He sat and aimed as the Beothuk man finally turned to run but the gun missed fire. He recocked and missed fire again. He threw down the rifle and rushed to Tom Taylor to haul his musket from his hands. The Beothuk had made barely twenty-five yards when the shot took him in the back and he crumpled forward onto the ice. He tried to stand but was unable and he began crawling awkwardly and inefficiently towards the shoreline on his hands and knees.